New Study Proves Consumers Respond More to Shared Content Than to Paid Placements
January 26, 2012 by Kevin Michael Gray
Today's featured article from AdAge.com may not come as a surprise to some but shared content is better received than paid advertisement... meaning a person is more likely to enjoy (and share with their friends) web content if one of their friends aggregated/endorsed the video even more so than if that person had come across that same web content in a paid ad median. Why do you think this is? We would love to hear your thoughts. Tweet about it @seedingideas Read more below:
Marketers have long assumed content shared by friends or other influencers carries more weight than paid placements. Now GE has some proof.
Working with social-media site Buzzfeed, the company commissioned digital-advertising measurement firm Vizu to test a campaign last fall in which the marketer distributed "The GE Show" video through Buzzfeed both in paid display placements and sharing, then tested how attitudes changed among people exposed each way.
People exposed via sharing had a significantly bigger lift in positive attitudes toward GE -- associating the brand with such things as creativity and innovation -- than people exposed via paid placements.
Overall, the "brand lift," which measured the extent to which consumers said they saw GE as "creative," was 138% higher for consumers exposed to via sharing through Buzzfeed than those who didn't see it at all. Specifically, 17% of people found GE creative after viewing the content via sharing vs. only 7% of people who made that connection without having seen the advertising at all.
Consumers exposed via sharing were also 83% more likely to rate GE "creative" than those exposed to the content via paid advertising on Buzzfeed.
The brand lift was calculated based on short online survey responses to the question: "What comes to mind when you think of General Electric (GE)?"
In all, thousands of people responded to short online surveys as part of the study, which broke them into groups exposed via paid media, exposed via sharing or not exposed at all to the content, said Jeff Smith, chief marketing officer of Vizu. While his firm has done numerous studies on brand lifts from paid digital ads and social media, it hasn't previously compared the two for the same content.
Overall, 42% of the responses about GE from people in the control group that didn't see the content were positive, compared to 55% of responses from people exposed via paid advertising and 77% for those exposed via sharing.
Obviously shared media has the advantage of being "free inventory," said Paul Marcum, director of global digital marketing and programming at GE. But he was also interested in knowing whether it actually has more impact on consumers than paid media.
"We all would intrinsically think that if you see something your friend has shared or a community you're part of has shared, you're more likely to value it differently" than paid placement, he said. "But no one we could find had actually tried to quantify the difference."
